This week the award-winning portrait photographer Laura Pannack shows us her Bookshelf

Laura Pannack has a genuine affinity for portrait photography and she widens her lens to include landscape as part of the character of her sitters. They are contemplative works, quietly magnetic to look at and have been recognised as much by quite a number of estimable awards including the Portraits Singles category of the World Press Photo awards. This week we welcome her to the Bookshelf slot and her five top tomes.

Joakim Eskildson: The Roma Journeys

This guy is pretty much my favourite photographer at the moment and this book is one that I have returned to for a few years now. For me it holds painterly images that seduce the imagination. His images are stunning and in treading the already over-photographed territory of Romas only means that their beauty and attention to detail needs to be even more capturing… which it is.

Ian Mc Ewan: First Love, Last Rites

Evidence of how much I love this book is reflected in its tattered and abused condition. My mum leant it to me about ten years ago and every time I spot it, I read a short story. Mc Ewan’s surreal world is such a relief to visit and with my impatience and short attention span, short stories are a fitting luxury.

Andrea Levy: Small Island

Like a few others books I had to abandon in my choice (like Ayn Rand and the occasional classic), I at first struggled to see why people raved about this book. But I am so glad I persisted; the plot could not have been more unappealing at first glance but the pace quickened halfway and the depth of characters created a divine novel. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.www.amazon.co.uk/small-islandwww.andrealevy.co.uk

Vladimir Nobokov: Lolita

As anyone who has read this will agree it is a firm favourite. Despite being his first attempt at writing in English, the intelligent poetry and incapsulating flow of this book is deepened by its controversial approach to the subject matter. Nabokov is most likely my favourite writer, his novels define the phrase “I couldn’t put it down.”www.amazon.co.uk/lolitawww.wikipedia.org/lolita

Having briefly mentioned Craig Gibson in our round up of the Photographers’ Gallery’s Fresh-Faced + Wild-Eyed show, we felt the Scottish photographer deserved a little bit more attention. Born After Birth is a project that explores the mysterious world of adult baptism in the Baptist Church community. Craig succeeds in taking a relatively weighty subject and presenting it in an accessible way. The imagery is documented sincerely avoiding dramatising what he sees. Craig also printed the series as an A5 zine, which gives the project a different dimension and alludes to the privacy within this concealed part of society by containing it in a small, hand-held object.

“Inspiration comes from cinema and cinematic photographers,” Nadia Lee Cohen, the 24-year-old photographer whose vibrant pseudo-sinister work has been ricocheting around the internet of late, tells us. “Anything focusing around suburbia with dark undertones usually has me sold.”

Conor’s a man of tradition, albeit those very strange, very British traditions that so many photographers find irresistible. The last time we featured his work, he had been catching up with the good people of the brilliantly named West Country town of Ottery St Mary, who have a penchant for setting fire to barrels full of tar. Now, he’s turned his attention to the less pyrotechnic but just as odd tradition of Swan Upping, the ceremony of checking and counting the Queen’s swans along the Thames. As many are aware, not only can swans break a man’s arm simply by looking at it (unverified), they are also all the property of the Queen.

Made lunch plans for today? I’d cancel them, if I were you, and instead dedicate an hour at midday to perusing the brand new issue of Accent Magazine. A biannual photography journal compiled by Lydia Garnett and Lucy Nurnberg, issue #9 of Accent Magazine showcases Julie Hascoët’s series Battre la Campagne – a collection images documenting the free-party movement which began almost 30 years ago, and which “was spearheaded by British music collective Spiral Tribe,” Julie explains. “In the early 90s, the culture grew steadily from its birthplace in southern England to Europe and North America, attracting travellers, nomads and free spirits along from all around the world.

There’s nothing quite like the first dip of summer in an outdoor swimming pool with the undulating waves lapping against your shins as you sit anchored to the tiled side. Capturing this shared experience is French photographer Karine Laval with her series The Pool, taken at swimming pools throughout Europe. The initial draw for Karine was the idea that swimming pools and beach resorts are a combination of the natural and the artificial: “They represent a dominant theme of modern life in our culture and mix the natural element of water with the culture and social element of a manmade environment,” she explains.

For one week every year, Nevada’s windswept Black Rock Desert is descended upon by over 65,000 revellers for Burning Man festival. Something of a massive social experiment, the festival built around ideas of community, art, gift-giving and what is called “radical self-reliance” takes its name from the ritualistic burning of a towering wooden effigy on the Saturday night. In its simplest incarnation, Burning Man is a seven-day desert rave where, blinded by dust and no doubt half-delirious from the sun, festival-goers erect a makeshift city for a surreal week of madness. But it is also host to a number of strange and fantastic happenings and site-specific installations and sculpture, including a mechanised fire-breathing octopus, lofty wooden temples standing 15 metres tall and the eponymous Man himself.